


Adapt

by baeberiibungh



Series: Games That We Play [1]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: AU, Animal Torture, Dark, Feeding, Hannibal is a Cannibal, M/M, No Sex, Parental Death, Psychopath, Sociopath, Sociopathy, Underage because Will is 14, people food, psychopathy, very dark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-22
Updated: 2015-12-22
Packaged: 2018-05-08 10:47:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5494403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/baeberiibungh/pseuds/baeberiibungh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will is 14, a sociopath and a budding psychopath. Then he meets a certain Hannibal Lecter...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Adapt

The memories are like some snippets or a montage, in a hue that stands apart from his other memories. They lacked something that Will couldn’t name, but also felt more real to him than any of the others he had of the same time. Will remembered climbing onto his father’s lap, while his father read a book and drinking something that smelled pungent from a small cup. Fish scales were still stuck to one of his knuckles and they were sitting out on the steps to the front door, the sun a hazy and warm thing in the sky and his father solid and holding onto him safely. 

He also remembered his mother sitting before the mirror, a pen in her hands while she jotted down something with a frown bisecting her brow that Will attempted to smooth out. She clutched his hand and gave his soft palm a kiss and then blew a raspberry on it while Will giggled. Will remembered being happy those occasions. Like the time they had go to his grandparents for the first time and he got to eat freshly baked cherry pie with fresh cream, an old beer bottle holding three yellow sunflowers that glowered in the mild light of the kitchen.

Will remembered the time he pulled out his goldfish from the small round aquarium and held onto it while it thrashed between the pads of his fingers, finally slipping through and falling onto the ground and it had flopped there, mouth open and lungs shuddering and Will had picked it up and let it fall off his hand again. It kept doing it again and again, definitely going limper with each fall, and then finally it had stopped moving. Will picked it up again, his brows furrowing so much like his mother as he grew displeased at the still fished. He threw the fish away, not caring where it landed and went away.

Later that night, when his mother asked him about the dead goldfish and how it managed to get out of its bowl, Will had presented an innocent face and managed to convince his mother that it was perhaps the cat. Will was 6 at the time of that incident.

The next came when he was 8. He had memories of the time he went camping for the first time and had melted marshmallows and drew knots with twines and hoisted group flags. Another memory that occurred in tandem but seemed to differ vastly was the time he caught a long garden snake, hardly larger than two feet, skewered it live with a sharp stick at a few points and burned it alive as the snake tried to crawl away from the fire. The movements the snake made with lessening intensity left Will feeling happy for the whole week.

Will made friends, people whose cruelty and innocence he could mimic with equal ease, and even got himself his first ‘girlfriend’, a fellow class mater who got fake married to him during recess so that everyone could play flower girls/boys and throw sand around. He was also gaining an awareness of self that there was something not exactly right with him, but what that degree of rightness was or how it could compute was incomprehensible to him. 

This awareness came to with an incident that occurred when his mother’s friend Judith came to visit the Grahams. She was a new mother and had brought along her new son in a nifty little pram that held the lolling baby. Will was intrigued, never been in the vicinity of much babies before. The kid was perhaps 6 months old, open mouth that showed pink gums and chubby cheeks, red and wet with saliva that the baby seemed to drip rather consistently. While the two women talked, and Will’s father sat in the armchair, occasionally leaning in on the conversation, they had a sudden blackout.

Will, who had been peering at the sleeping baby, decided on the spur of the moment to cover the mouth and nose of the baby and did so, swiftly. The baby began to struggle, shaking its head from side to side, it’s chubby fists glancing off Will’s arms and Will found it interesting. However, the idea came to him that if it was found out that he had killed off the baby, he would be sent to the jail, away from his mother and father and they make you do hard stuff in jail and so he let his hands go. 

The baby instantly started crying uproariously, and the light came back on just a few seconds later. Judith fused over the baby, reassuring Will’s mother that it was just the darkness which had frightened the baby. No one noticed Will standing to the side, a smile fixed on his face, his fists clenched. Later that night, Will had touched had rubbed his hands, still feeling the baby shaking under his hands and he found that he wanted to feel it again. And so he did.

At that point, his parents were fighting almost constantly. Crude words were exchanged at every conversation and Will would just put his head down and go on with his things. Other people thought that Will was sad or appalled at the behaviour of his parents, the poor little boy. What he did feel was absolutely nothing. Their harsh words and roaring sentiments did nothing for him and he came to like the affection that others showed on him on account of the fighting. However, he had never envisioned that he would be shipped off to his grandparents’ just so that his parents could fight in peace.

That had made him angry, furious. He had no problem with how his parents survived their lives, but he had gotten the hang of how to pretend it well enough from his friend and his acquaintances and now he will have to pick up entirely new cues and reflections and he had never been so much angrier. He packed up each and every piece of his stuff, clothes, presents, books, etc, and then threw them away in the pond behind the house they lived in and then proceeded to go to his grandparents only with the shirt on his body. It had just escalated the fights between his parents and when he got down from the car, he didn’t turn back to see their face.

His parents die two days later in an automobile accident, due to a loss of brake fluid. 

Life becomes drastically different at the farm. He gets a new school, a new room, a new and long list of chores, and a whole wilderness to explore and experiment in. He makes a few token friends at the school, the people there too bull-headed to be easily persuaded or swayed by his slick mimicry, holding offense to weird things and able to pick up the fact that his brain works differently with just a few interaction. He has to work a lot to fit in well enough to be not assumed as a threat and be threat enough to not be bullied.

The best part though, is the big forest behind the farm. Full of old trees that still bear different fruits, the trees huge and wide, providing many a nooks and cranny for wild animals to hide in. Will learns how to hunt, and skin and gut his catch. His grandfather hands him a rifle and sets him off for leisure time in the forest after having imparted enough of his knowledge so that Will knows what to do and what not to. Those few hours are a time of absolute freedom for Will. He manages to bring back only small hares and the like, but his grandparents never say anything about it to him though, even when he starts to smell like fire and smoke on every excursion. 

They think that Will catches even smaller prey and so just cooks it quickly and eat it alone. He is a city boy after all. What they don’t know is that Will is a very, very good hunter. Each hunt he manages to catch at least three animals, his snares simple but top notch. Those he catches and burns alive on an open pit, not even caring to disembowel them before skewering them onto crude and jagged sticks. He never puts the sticks down but hold onto it as the animal struggles, letting out pitiful sounds of cries and whimpers. After he is done, he either throws them away or let them burn down to a crisp in the fire. He never puts a fire out, but waits till the fire goes down on its own, as if waiting to see if it would perhaps spread. 

It is a cloudy evening, when Will, who had burned two hares and a baby fox alive in the fire, stumbles upon a huge man sitting on the ground, by a small pit fire, while a piece of meat hangs off from a stick. The meat is a bit charred on one side and the other side is still pink. When Will stumbles in, the man, who has a rather angular face, looks up at him, but then turns away with ease and ignores him while he cleans the ... fur?... from a piece of thin looking meat.

“Hello,” Will says, intrigued by this stranger who sits in the forest as if he owns it. Will is not afraid, is in fact sure that he will be able to pull out his butterfly knife and slice through his face in record time should the man make a wrong move. His grandparents’ farm is not isolated, but it is not near a busy road either, and the man looks like he is not from around his home, so Will is curious. He leans in, putting his hands on his knees and squints in the cracking light at what the man is scraping the fur off.

“Hannibal,” the stranger provides, at the same instant that Will realises that the piece of meal that Will assumed the man was de-furring was actually a piece of scalp, looking too much like a human’s. He looks back at the piece cooking by the fire and looks back at Hannibal, who is looking on pleasantly at Will, with a nice little smile sitting on his lips. When Will sits down abruptly and scoots nearer, the man, Hannibal, actually looks shocked, as if that was not the reaction he was not accepting.

“Who are you cooking?” Will asks, all nonchalance, while his hand covers the hilt of the knife in his pocket. 

Hannibal stares at him for a moment, his face too neutral almost and then says, “An old friend.”

“Tastes good?” Will asks, not really caring that much about the answer. He is simply intrigued and can’t help imagine how things will turn out now.

“Why don’t you try it out and find out yourself?” Hannibal asks Will, the little boy, with the mirth of Devil dancing in his eyes and his body bowed forward as if in anticipation. 

Will turns back to the piece of meat, sees how the juices keep running out in a sizzling hiss, find his mouth watering and says in a polite tone, “Don’t mind if I do.”

Hannibal uses the knife he had been using to clean the scalp, after one cleaning brush on his pants, to cut a cooked bit from the hunk near the fire and offers it to Will, smirking something awful at him. Will gives him a cheeky smile, takes the cooked meat from his hands and takes a hearty bite. It tastes just like grandma’s pork fry, Will thinks, but before he could think anymore, Hannibal had encircled his hand around his throat, the knife he used at Will’s throat and asks in a deceptively calm voice, “Would you like some more?”

Will, in the meantime, who had been carrying on his thoughtful chews and says, “I won’t mind having some more.” 

Hannibal gives him a wide predatory smile so that his white teeth flash in the fire for a moment and then takes the hand with the knife off his wind pipe, although the hand circling his neck does not move, even though the pressure lessens. Hannibal spends the next half an hour, till the sky goes black as seen through the canopy of the lush branches, feeding Will more bites of the cooking meat, sometimes smearing the juices on his lips so that they looks glazed. Will takes each bite whole into his mouth and eats with obvious enjoyment, sometimes even licking Hannibal’s finger and gives a haughty smile when Hannibal’s gaze sharpen after a nip to his finger.

Hannibal then moves away from Will, and tells him to go back home. 

Will dusts his knees and legs, pulls out his flashlight and heads straight home. He returns from halfway home to find Hannibal standing up near the watered fire pit, a hefty bag over his shoulder and another in his hand and tells Hannibal exactly where he lives. Hannibal makes no movement, and after a long look at him and his face from the slanted flashlight that illuminated his chest area, Will turns back and returns home. That night and the two weeks after, he jerks himself off many times thinking about Hannibal.

Two months later, Will is introduced to Hannibal as the new extra for the farm by his grandfather and Will can only smile toothily at Hannibal while Hannibal smirks back at Will. This was going to be an interesting time in his life, Will thinks to himself and remembers the precise moment he realised he wanted to feel Hannibal flutter in the throes of death at his hands.

**Author's Note:**

> Unbetaed. Thank you for reading. Please do leave comments to let me know how you liked it!


End file.
